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much courage as a soldier (guerrier)." 40 This military analogy and the whole context in which
it appears suggest the concept of the avant-garde, itself derived from a military metaphor. In
contrast to the boldness of the romantic, the classicist is cautious to the point of cowardice.
And the contemporary public protects him because it is terrorized by the great reputations of
the past. This explains why the present does not dare ask for what it needs. People are
unwittingly victims of the despotic power of habit, and it is one of the writer's major tasks to
41
try to eliminate its inhibiting and almost paralyzing effects in matters of imagination.
Stendhal is aware that to be consistently modern (romantic, in his terminology) one has to
take the risk of shocking the public, at least insofar as its taste is influenced by official
academicism and a host of deep-rooted prejudices, for which an inadequate understanding of
tradition is responsible.

In brief, for Stendhal the concept of romanticism embodies the notions of change, relativity,
and, above all, presentness, which make its meaning coincide to a large extent with what
Baudelaire would call four decades later "la modernité." Romanticism, simply put, is the
sense of the present conveyed artistically. Its sphere is thus much restricted, but at the same
time its identity becomes essentially fleeting, extremely difficult to grasp because it cannot
be defined in terms of past traditions (Christian or otherwise), and very provisional because
it stakes its survival on the confirmation of the future. It is known that Stendhal himself,
throughout a literary career that went almost unnoticed by his contemporaries, took comfort
in the thought that the future would do him justice. There is much more to Stendhal's
preoccupation with the future than the mere compensatory dream of someone suffering from
lack of recognition. His personality is structurally that of a self-willed and entirely
self-conscious precursor, although he clearly does not approve the vague rhetoric of futurity
in which other romantics indulged (his known dislike of Victor Hugo's prophetic attitudes is
significant). Stendhal was a "romantic" in his own sense of the word, and this is why, even in
Racine et Shakespeare, written before his major works,

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he could sometimes be blatantly antiromantic, and consistent with his lifelong literary creed
that was later termed "realist." In Stendhal, some of the distinctive paradoxes involved in the
idea of literary modernity are already present. The most striking one is that, liberated from
the constraints of tradition, the writer should strive to give his contemporaries a pleasure that
they seem unprepared to enjoy and perhaps do not even deserve.

TH E TW O M OD ERN I TI ES
It is impossible to say precisely when one can begin to speak of the existence of two distinct
and bitterly conflicting modernities. What is certain is that at some point during the first half
of the nineteenth century an irreversible split occurred between modernity as a stage in the
history of Western civilization -- a product of scientific and technological progress, of the
 -42-

44
in an article by Théophile Gautier published in 1867. The more recent and comprehensive
Robert Dictionary discovers its first occurrence in Chateaubriand's Mémoires d'outre-tombe,
which appeared in 1849. Neither Littré nor Robert mentions Baudelaire's use of "modernité"
in his article on Constantin Guys, written in 1859 and published in 1863.

To appreciate the oustandingly original and seminal quality of Baudelaire's concept of

"modernity" it will be instructive to consider here the way Chateaubriand employed the term
about two decades earlier. In the 1833 diary notes taken during his trip from Paris to Prague
and included as such in Mémoires d'outre-tombe, Chateaubriand uses "modernité" to refer
disparagingly to the meanness and banality of everyday "modern life" as opposed to the
eternal sublimity of nature and the grandeur of a legendary medieval past. The triteness of
"modernity" comes out quite unequivocally: "The vulgarity, the modernity of the customs
building and the passport," Chateaubriand writes, "were in contrast to the storm, the Gothic
gates, the sound of the horn and the noise of the torrent." 45 I might add that the pejorative
meaning of "modernity" has coexisted with the opposite, approbative sense in a fluctuating
relationship that reflects the larger conflict between the two modernities.

The history of the alienation of the modern writer starts with the romantic movement. In an
early phase, the object of hatred and ridicule is philistinism, a typical form of middle-class
hypocrisy. The best example is preromantic and romantic Germany, where the critique of
philistine mentality (with all its heavy and stupid pretensions, crass prosaism, and false,
totally inadequate praise of intellectual values to disguise an obsessive preoccupation with
material ones) played an essential role in the overall picture of cultural life. The satirical
portrait of the philistine is frequently encountered in German romantic prose -- we have only
to recall E.T.A. Hoffmann's tales of the supernatural, and the typically Hoffmannesque
antithesis between the creative powers of imagination (symbolized

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by, among others, the unforgettable Anselmus in Der Goldene Topf) and the utterly
platitudinous character of the bourgeois world, with its solemn and empty earnestness. As a
result, the term "philistine," negative and insulting as it was, acquired a definite social
meaning, first in Germany, then in all Western cultures.

The significance of this semantic shift may be better understood when we compare the
philistine to the laughingstock of the preceding neoclassical period, namely, the pedant. The
pedant is a purely intellectual type and, as such, his social background is immaterial to the
satirist who wants to portray him. The philistine is, on the contrary, defined mainly by his
class background, all his intellectual attitudes being nothing but disguises of practical
interests and social concerns.

The romantic critique of philistinism in Germany was taken over by young radical groups in
the 1830s and 1840s, and worked out into a clear-cut opposition between two types: the
revolutionary and the philistine. This is obviously the source of one of the most stubborn
clichés in the Marxist criticism of Goethe, namely, that the great poet had a double nature,
that he was both a rebel and a philistine, as Engels saw him in 1847: "Goethe's relation to the
German society of his time in his works is of two kinds. At one time he is hostile to it,…he
rebels against it as Gotz, Prometheus, Faust…. At another time he is friendly to it,
'accommodates' to it…. Thus Goethe is at one time colossal, at another petty; sometimes a
defiant, scornful genius full of contempt for the world, other times a cautious, contented,
46
narrow Philistine." Interestingly, the notion of philistinism, which was originally a form of
aesthetic protest against bourgeois mentality, was transformed in Germany into an
instrument of ideological and political criticism.

In postrevolutionary France the opposite trend prevailed: various kinds of antibourgeois

political radicalism (with both leftist and rightist implications, mixed in the most diverse
proportions) underwent a process of aestheticization, so that we should not be surprised to
discover that movements characterized by their extreme

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aestheticism, such as the loosely defined l'art pour l'art, or the later décadentisme and
symbolisme, can best be understood when regarded as intensely polemical reactions against
the expanding modernity of the middle class, with its terre-à-terre outlook, utilitarian
preconceptions, mediocre conformity, and baseness of taste.

The idea of art's autonomy was by no means a novelty in the 1830s, when the battlecry of Art
for Art's Sake became popular in France among circles of young Bohemian poets and painters.
The view of art as an autonomous activity had been defended half a century earlier by Kant,
who, in his Critique of Judgment ( 1790), had formulated his paradoxical concept of art's
"purposiveness without a purpose" and thus affirmed art's fundamental disinterestedness.
But l'art pour l'art as it was conceived by Théophile Gautier and his followers was not so much
a full-fledged aesthetic theory as a rallying cry for artists who had become weary of empty
romantic humanitarianism and felt the need to express their hatred of bourgeois
mercantilism and vulgar utilitarianism. The central statement of Gautier in his preface to
Mademoiselle de Maupin ( 1835) is characteristically negative, a definition of beauty in terms
of its total uselessness: "Il n'y a de vraiment beau que ce qui ne peut servir à rien; tout ce qui
est utile est laid." In contrast to the views defended by Kant and his disciples in Germany, the
partisans of l'art pour l'art promote a primarily polemical concept of beauty, derived not so
much from an ideal of disinterestedness as from an aggressive assertion of art's total
gratuitousness. This concept of beauty is perfectly summed up by the famous formula --
épater le bourgeois. Art for Art's Sake is the first product of aesthetic modernity's rebellion
against the modernity of the philistine.

Given that modern civilization is ugly, Théophile Gautier's attitude toward it is in fact more
complex and ambivalent than his youthful preface to Mademoiselle de Maupin tends to
suggest. In an article published in 1848 and entitled Plastique et civilisation -- Du beau
antique et du beau moderne, Gautier argues that the ugliness of modern industrial life can be
transformed. The result would be a

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modern kind of beauty, different from the canonic beauty of antiquity. Obviously, this can be
achieved only on the basis of an acceptance of modernity as it is. Gautier writes specifically:

It goes without saying that we accept civilization as it is, with its railroads, steamboats,
English scientific research, central heating, factory chimneys and all its technical equipment,
47
which have been considered impervious to the picturesque.

Like Baudelaire -- whose concept of the "heroism of modern life" he seems to echo here --
Gautier is aware that the straight rejection of modern civilization as irredeemably ugly can be
as much of a philistine attitude as the superficial praise of it. At the same time, he seems to
realize that the aesthetic promotion of modernity can be turned against both the spirit of
academicism and the escapist tendencies nurtured by romantic clichés. Gautier did not
explore all the consequences of this viewpoint, but he was one of the first to suggest that
certain images of modern life could become significant elements in the general strategy of
artistic modernity, with its compelling aim of épater le bourgeois.

BAUD ELAI RE AN D TH E PARAD OXES OF

AESTH ETI C M OD ERN I TY
Baudelaire's preoccupation with modernity dates from his youth -- I am thinking of his first
comprehensive definition of romanticism in "The Salon of 1846," a definition that,
interestingly, follows Stendhal's: "For me, romanticism is the most recent, the most
48
contemporary expression of beauty." And Baudelaire goes on to say that "there are as
many kinds of beauty as there are habitual ways of seeking happiness" -- the association of
beauty with happiness coming again from Stendhal, specifically from the latter's

-46-

aphorism in which beauty is defined as a promise of happiness ("Le Beau n'est que la
promesse du bonheur"). The argument of change, on which the defense of contemporary
taste is based, may also be Stendhalian, but Baudelaire's explicit identification of
romanticism with modern art puts a new and radical emphasis on the idea of modernity and
on the value of novelty.

…Just as there have been as many ideals as there have been ways in which people
understand morality, love, religion, etc., so romanticism will not consist in perfect execution,
but in a conception analogous to the morality of the period…. Thus, above all it is necessary
to know those aspects of nature and those situations of man which were disdained or